This week, I’ll be headed Washington D.C. to speak at recruitDC’s 2016 Fall Conference. My session will be about attracting top talent with an unknown or misunderstood employer brand. Whether you’re a startup or established organization you may have a misunderstood brand where the market perception is different from your actual company culture and employee experience. In both cases, trying to compete with the Googles and Facebooks of the world to attract and hire top talent may feel like an impossible tasks. But it doesn’t have to be.

In my session I will share four key components you need in order to build a great talent attraction strategy to help transform your employee brand. Those four components are developing a compelling EVP, sharing authentic stories, empowering your employees as brand ambassadors, and building your marketing machine.

Developing a compelling EVP

The EVP or Employee Value Proposition is a simple, overarching statement that ultimately becomes the essence of your employee experience and employer brand commitment. This is one of the most important steps because it lays the foundation of how you communicate what’s unique about your company as an employer. So before you launch any employer branding efforts, take time to really build out your EVP.

Tell authentic stories that resonate

The key is to give your candidates an insider look into your company, and paints an authentic and accurate picture of what life is really like working at your company. So for example, ask your employees to share what they love most about their job, the impact they get to make on your customers through their work, how their job contributes to the company’s mission, and what makes them proud to work to work at your company.

Empowering your employees as brand ambassadors

Employer branding is as much an employee engagement strategy as an external talent attraction strategy. So before you start any employer branding efforts, you really need to take a hard look at your company culture first. Is a great culture that your employees feel proud to talk about and share with their friends? If not, you need to fix that first.

Building your marketing machine

Once you’ve got your EVP research, you want to start defining your audience and creating your candidate personas – by company level, organization level, and even at the job level. For example, when meeting with your hiring managers, asking questions beyond work experience and education level that they’re seeking, and learn more about the types of personality that perform best on their team, where their team goes to learn online, what sorts of events and conferences they attend, etc.

To learn more join me on November 17, 2016 starting at 10:30am at the recruitDC Fall 2016 Recruiting Conference. Register here.

recruitDC is a recruiting community developed by DC-Area recruiters for DC-Area recruiters. Through a series of conference-style events that attract national speakers and highlight local best practices, DC-Area recruiters have a focal point from which they can learn and grow. Through networking events and a strong social media presence, recruitDC offers DC-Area recruiters a broad community to call their own.